JULY 15, 2007

GENRE: CRAP, SURVIVAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

It's almost sad that Captivity has finally been released, as it means we will never get another missed release date. Driving around LA, one will see about 900 posters for the film, most of them with the correct release date, but there are a few with the older dates (May 18^th, and June 22^nd), with the final "Friday the 13^th: July 13^th". But as it turns out, there isn't a date on the calendar that would have been the 'best' time to release this god awful piece of shit.

(reprinted without permission from Horror Movie A Day)

JULY 7, 2007

GENRE: TEEN, WEREWOLF
SOURCE: DVD (STORE RENTAL)

Though most of my work for Bloody-D is editing based, I occasionally do the odd interview or junket. Usually my reasons are simple: I like free food. But there was no such benefit to interviewing Agnes Bruckner on the phone for Blood & Chocolate. I couldn't even see her!! But it was all worth it, when I asked her "What do you prefer, blood or chocolate?" I didn't write that question, and I made sure to point that out. We then laughed at how stupid a question it was. Whether she answered or not, I forget.

(reprinted without permission from Horror Movie A Day)

JUNE 15, 2007

GENRE: CRAP, SLASHER

Wow.  I really thought Drive Thru would be the worst movie I saw this week.  Leave it to… oh wait, saying the names of anyone involved with this piece of shit would be meaningless, since none of them have any other credits to their name.  Well, whoever they are, leave it to them to make what is not only the worst movie this week, but possibly the worst movie in the entire Horror Movie A Day canon.

Yes, even Bill Rebane himself never made anything as technically and creatively inept as A Brush With Death.  I don't even know where to begin pointing out everything that is wrong with this asstacular movie.

Let's start with the DVD packaging.  The cover features a blond girl who is in some sort of half Christ pose in the middle of a tornado of some sort.  Basically, she looks like a telekinesis prone heroine or villain, sort of like your Carries and Tamaras.  I cannot discern if the actress is even in the movie (her hair is obscuring most of her face), but none of the blondes in the film ever display anything even resembling a personality, let alone powers of any sort, so it doesn't matter.

Then on the back, the film is described thusly: "Five cheerleaders spend the night in an abandoned farmhouse and find themselves up against a vengeful ghost.  They soon find out the spirit is from a dead boy who painted a portrait of the brother he killed forty years earlier."  OK, that's pretty much the lamest and half-assed description of a movie ever (he painted a portrait? So the fuck what?), but the problem is it doesn't even approach accuracy.  They don't spend the night in the farmhouse, they TALK about doing it but never actually do.  In fact they don't even go there until the last 20 minutes of the film.  And it's not a ghost they are up against – it's a guy who looks like an accountant who appears out of nowhere (but not in the ghost way, in the 'poor screenwriting; this mystery killer hasn't appeared in the film before being revealed as the killer' way).  As for painting a portrait of his brother – you got me.  He paints stuff (in the film's tiniest shred of interesting storytelling, he drains his victims' blood and paints with it) but not his brother. And if he killed his brother then why is he the dead one???  Whatever.  I guess they had to put SOMETHING back there (there are no credits listed on the back, and the disc has no extra features), so let's move on.

Popping in the disc reveals that, despite being a new film, the transfer is not anamorphic.  So I had to watch the movie zoomed, thus making it look worse than it already did.  I can't even tell if it was film or video.  Pretty sure it was the latter.  We also have glorious 2.0 sound.  Ooooh!

The opening credits (this is going to be a long writeup – my page of notes is covered) provide one of the biggest laughs I've ever gotten – the fucking casting person is credited BEFORE the people in the cast!  I have never seen that before.  It also claims to be based on a true story, but of course that is likely a lie.  The credits also contradict one another – the credited writers change from beginning to end (yes, even though there are opening credits with the director, producers, writers, casting, etc, they are all repeated at the end before the usual scrolling list.  This means that the no-name actors are actually given THREE screen credits).

In what has to be a first for a horror movie, the car breaks down before we even know half of our characters' names. Almost immediately they are helped (the car just ran out of gas), and as the guy puts gas in, he has a flashback that lasts longer than the main story has lasted so far.  Making matters worse – the contents of this flashback have no bearing on anything else in the movie.  Random flashbacks are a theme of this movie, as about 2 minutes after this one ends, we get another one (introduced with its own title, like Kill Bill or something) that again has no real bearing on the plot of the rest of the film (it does have something to do with the plot on the back of the DVD though). There's another one later about 2 backpackers that again, goes absolutely nowhere.

Every line of dialogue in this film is either badly ADRed, done as a voiceover over shots where the characters are obviously not even talking, or recorded badly on set (possibly even with the camera's built in mic).  There are scenes of people talking where one character's audio will be loud and clear (if obviously recorded in a booth and not outside by a pool or wherever the character is supposed to be) and the other won't be audible at all.  Excellent.  The unintentional comedy provided by constant VO lines almost makes the film worth watching.  There's a part where the girls are getting out of the car and the soundtrack just has an assortment of random lines like "here's your bag." - because someone onscreen is handing another a bag (she's not talking).  It's like an unfunny version of MST3k, where instead of saying jokes they are sort of filling in dead audio with general observations.  There's another part where a filthy mechanic character tells the girls to 'service' him or something and they dub in some "Ew, Gross!" style dialogue as the girls simply stand around doing nothing.  It's simply amazing.  Often, director Brad Wiebe tries his hardest to hide this audio limitation by cutting to a character who is listening to whoever is allegedly talking.  This makes some scenes more confusing than necessary, since the girls all sound similar to one another.  "Who the Christing fuck is talking?" will be a question you will ask yourself often when watching this thing.

Rare is a film that is both padded to hell and overplotted.  For every entirely useless and unnecessary scene, like when a character needs to be explained how to play Truth or Dare (???), there is another like one of the girls talking to someone on her cell phone about how they never appreciate her and make her feel bad about herself.  Who she is talking to, what exactly he/she did to piss her off, or what it has to do with anything at all is never clear.  Much like the flashbacks, it serves nothing other than to continually make the audience wonder what exactly the movie is supposed to be about.

And while I thought nothing could be more hilarious than the casting credit, or the scene where the girls are 'partying' and they offer a guy a "drink" (which is a 20 oz Coke), the ending managed to make me laugh harder than I have at anything all year.  Our final girl hits the accountant guy over the head, leaves her surviving friends tied up in the farmhouse, and runs outside.  Her friend, a guy who may be a rapist, drives by and she gets in the car as he takes a phone call.  THE END.  I shit you not. You expect a cut to the interior of the car, or maybe the killer getting back up, or maybe finally seeing the blond witch girl on the cover, but instead it cuts to an honest to god THE END title card.

And to top it off, much like The Woods, this film also has a character we are supposed to like make fun of a handicapped person.  Nice.

You know, I understand that filmmaking is a business, but when I see something as soulless and worthless as this, it really pisses me off.  It's obvious that no one involved has any real respect or love for the genre (or even film in general) and were obviously out to make a quick buck.  Christ, they don't even seem to know anything about filmmaking at all beyond knowing how to turn the camera on. As awful as it was, even Drive Thru displayed some working knowledge of horror movies (since they ripped so many off blindly).  And yeah, no one is going to pretend a movie like Friday the 13^th wasn't made simply to double an investment, but at least they made a decent film by putting some goddamn effort into it.  There is no such evidence here.  And it further saddens me to know that there is a family of four somewhere that could have been fed for almost a whole day with the money they used to make this film.  It's a goddamn travesty.

What say you?

JUNE 11, 2007

GENRE: SLASHER

There are many oddities about Popcorn, and I am not sure if they are due to the production troubles (both original director (Alan Ormsby!!) and star (someone else!!!) were replaced after 3 weeks by Mark Herrier and Jill Schoelen, respectively) or just a really half-assed script, but they really serve to make this movie stick out, if not necessarily in a good way.

For starters, "Popcorn" has nothing to do with the movie.  OK, it's at a movie theater, where popcorn can be bought.  Fine, but that means the movie could just as well be titled "Soda", "Ticket", or "Gift Card".  There's also one of the lamest final lines in movie history ("Can you hold me?" which is a far cry from the brilliant final line in Schoelen's previous slasher, Cutting Class) which suddenly turns the movie into a love story.  Speaking of Schoelen, she may be cute as hell, but the girl cannot act worth a shit.  Her delivery is so wooden, she often sounds like the dubbed performer in an Italian movie.  The rest of the cast is OK for this type of thing, with a few familiar faces (Kelly Jo Minter, Tom Villard).  They are supposed to be playing film students, yet they never film anything and dismiss Ingmar Bergman, which is just confusing to say the least.

And for a slasher movie, this one strays too far from the established rules, serving to make the film not more original, but more oddly paced.  For example, the killer reveals himself and his master plan with a half an hour left, and at least 4 would be victims still around.  What sort of slasher does that?  Plus, he literally leaves the climactic battle with Schoelen to go kill someone for no reason, only to come right back and pick up where he left of.  Huh?  He's also strangely selective, with only 4 kills out of the group of 8 or so film students, a professor, 2 jerks, and an old time theater showman (that guy disappears from the movie entirely after his one scene).  In fact, had the movie taken out its occasional F bombs, it would probably have gotten a PG-13, which would make a lot more sense, since the film is an homage to PG rated monster and mad science movies from the 1950s.  The kills are bloodless, there is no nudity, and it's certainly not "intense" in any way shape or form.  And the kills are pretty damn lazy.  The best scene in the film is when the film professor is skewered by a giant prop mosquito.  And whoever directed/wrote it must have felt the same way, because they opted to do the exact same thing at the end to off the killer.  Again, weird.

Even the credits offer something you never see (but didn't actually want to): the laughable credit "Filmed on location in Jamaica."  Not, like, Kingston, Jamaica, or whatever.  Just: Jamaica.  That certainly explains all of the reggae music in the film, but doesn't explain in what sort of world that it's easier to send an American cast down to Jamaica to film a movie that takes place almost entirely inside a movie theater than to just film in LA (where the movie is supposed to take place).  Like everything else in the movie, whatever.

I must point out that the intention of the film is A+ and is the only reason I'm not dumping it in the Crap genre.  There is nothing wrong with paying tribute to the bygone days where going to a movie was an event, offering you something you couldn't get at home with your own home theater.  Especially in the wake of the pisspoor box office performance of Hostel II (the best chance the genre has for a while to climb out of its long losing streak – Saw III being the last real "hit" horror film), it's nice to be reminded of when people actually went to the theater (and in turn, the theater provided the customers with an EXPERIENCE).  There are at least attempts by some theaters to make things better. The Arclight in LA makes efforts to making movie-going a bit more classy (no ads, assigned seating, ushers stationed inside the theater to keep cell phone usage/talking to a minimum), and the Regal cinema chain has begun providing little remotes to customers that can be used to alert the theater to a problem (with sound, picture, audience).  Such efforts are laudable, but they shouldn't have been necessary to begin with.  Hopefully, more theaters will follow their lead so we can at least begin to weed out all of the assholes who seek to ruin the experience for others, but I think going a step further and occasionally utilizing William Castle style gimmicks would help get people back to the theaters.

That or less crap.  Either or.

What say you?